Save this story Save Story Save this story Something in the literary world isn’t adding up. On the surface, the numbers aren’t looking good. If you’re an American, there’s a roughly 38% chance you’ll read a novel or short story this year. If you’re an American man , that number slips to 28%. By most metrics, it’s a hard time for literature .
There’s an undeniable energy bubbling up in New York, Los Angeles, London , and elsewhere. Readings are “ sexy ” now, supposedly, and a medley of exciting new publications have popped up, both online and in print. Ben Lerner and Emma Cline returned this year, and we’ve been graced with the strongest crop of debut novels in recent memory, from Caro Claire Burke’s culture-conquering Yesteryear to the jagged edges of Madeline Cash’s Lost Lambs to the vibrant energy of Sufiyaan Salam’s Wimmy Road Boyz. People spent the summer reading The Odyssey and crashing The London Review of Books website to read discourse about The Odyssey . So it can’t be all bad, right?
This is an attempt to snapshot the so-called State of Books at the end of 2026. The literary world is way too big for any one story to encompass, and this one is accordingly incomplete. We spoke to 34 people—we could have spoken to 300 more. You won’t find any scouts or book club celebrities here, nor did we reach anyone from the big tech companies that continue to reshape the landscape of publishing. There are lots of urgent issues that didn’t make it into this piece, including book bans, youth literacy, and the continuing rise of audiobooks. Each of those could be worthy of its own panel discussion. And we left out some of the points that our panelists agreed on unanimously: Agents still matter, booksellers are essential. More still got left on the cutting-room floor.
What did emerge was a widespread sense of concern. There’s a consensus that the old ways of publishing have broken down. Making books is more expensive, readers are more difficult to reach, and AI is giving nearly everyone the jimjams. But with that comes a sense of opportunity that’s making people optimistic—and down to party. Between self-publishing, Substack , and a small-press renaissance, writers, editors, and content creators are pushing out into a strange new frontier.
Rumaan Alam: It’s a more anxious time. There was a time in my career where agents, editors, and publicists wanted to telegraph confidence and a belief in a system as it was, and I’m not sure that that is the case any longer.
My agent, my publisher, my publicist, I feel like they’ve always been very direct with me. But I’m more accustomed to hearing now—from people who ought to know, people who are the experts— that they in fact don’t know what is going to happen.
Grace Byron: There’s a contraction of money, at a macro and micro level. A lot of layoffs, a lot of people playing it safe, a lot of people nervous about the future of publishing. One way that you see that is the continual panic over literacy rates, decline in reading rates, decline in book sales and in book reviews, obviously. The Washington Post just cut their books section, and large magazines have followed suit in a lot of places. And I think you see less literary fiction, or less sales.
A lot of people seem really worried, and rightfully so, about the rise of AI, the rise of celebrity memoirs, the rise of romantasy, and these sort of continual panics over what that means for “serious” writing or “serious” writers.
The other big shift is Substack and self-publishing.
Nelio Biedermann: When you talk to someone in the industry for longer than 5 or 10 minutes, it often gets to how much better it was back in the days. Writers say they sold more novels to publishers. People at parties say the parties were better 20 years ago. It can be kind of frustrating if you come into the industry new and everyone talks about how much better it was and you’re 20 or 40 years late.
Lauren Oyler: There’s no new Sally Rooney, or no new phenomenon. The new phenomenon is “more things to freak out about.”
Joelle Owusu-Seykere: The amount of people who get the opportunity to publish a book has definitely broadened. The early change came from the diversification of who works in publishing. Back in the day it was usually people with history and English lit degrees who went to Oxford and Cambridge and Harvard. That’s still the case, but it’s opened up to people who are genuinely quite normal. What we bring is something more interesting, because we’ve read way more diversely, and we’re not from that kind of stuffy publishing background. I’m proud to be a part of that set.
I know there’s been a lot of social change in the past decade or so, and lots of conversations online about how publishing can be more accessible. But you can’t have a wider range of writers if we don’t have a wider range of people actually doing the publishing.
Bryan Washington Courtesy of the MacArthur Foundation Publishers are listening a lot more. There’s some that aren’t. There’s some that generally don’t give a fuck. But the ones who actually care about broadening their readership, just reaching new readers, new people—we are actually listening.
Bryan Washington: At least amongst major publishers, so to speak, in the U.S., there is a broadening of scope as far as the specificity of narratives that are being written and the diversity of experiences in narratives that are being written. On the other hand, the support for authors who are writing outside of a mainstream context—whether it’s promotion, whether it’s marketing, whether it’s visibility—seems to be continuing to decline, with some notable exceptions. Particularly if you’re a marginalized author, getting in front of a reader seems to be growing more and more difficult for a variety of reasons. But many of them, I think, stem from lack of support from publishers.
Ottessa Moshfegh: Writing means a lot of things, you know, and I think we’re starting to see more of the variety of things a writer does. That includes podcasting, that includes content creation, just as much as it includes screenwriting and journalism and being a novelist. I think there’s less of this tight-fisted “Here is the world of literature” [mindset]. I think the edges of that category are starting to soften. You can either hate it or love it or not care, but it’s happening.
Eden Yonas: On the creative end, for people who are talking about books and people who are writing books and people who are marketing books, there is this constant desire to keep up with things as they gain in popularity, and as a result, there’s kind of [a] “go, go, go,” get-the-next-thing-out [mentality].
R.F. Kuang: I think the elephant in the room is the transition to video everywhere, right? I When we were in the marketing and publicity phase for books that were published longer ago, there would be more suggestions for blog posts and blog interviews and essay submissions, which are still the sorts of things I would prefer to do. And in my last two launches, I’ve noticed it’s just a gazillion video requests, whether that’s short-form interviews or longer YouTube things. It is a bit of a hassle from the author’s perspective because it means you have to dress like a person and put on a presentable face and be in front of a camera more often.
Hua Hsu: It’s been bracing to see how different the things you have to do as an author are now, as opposed to 2022, as opposed to 2020 or 2015. It’s not bad. It’s just very different. I thought that I’d done everything that one could possibly be asked to do circa 2022, but just four years later, the range of opportunities you have to talk about your book, venues, forums, spaces online and IRL—it’s pretty dizzying. I don’t think I had to do one on-camera thing in 2022.
LeVar Burton: The act of reading, and how we perceive readers, has changed. What was once seen as a solitary act has become a social one. Through platforms like BookTok, Bookstagram, and Substack, the reader is no longer a lone figure in an armchair. Now, they’re part of a vibrant and visible community.
Valeria Luiselli: The last time I published before just now was almost a decade ago, and things have certainly changed. One thing that I think changed positively is the enormous variety of people who talk about books in social media. Especially in the Spanish speaking world, where I started this book tour, we had events that were just like, breakfast with 50 young people who do different kinds of things on TikTok, Instagram, etc. around books. What I found in those spaces was this lively, funny, well-read, diverse community of people who care about books, and when I asked them, “So what are you guys? Are you Bookstagram? What do you call yourselves?” most of them laughed. One of them said, "No, we’re just unpaid journalists.”
We just have a greater variety of opinions now, and that has taken weight off of, like, the New York Times review, the Guardian review, that one thing that was a game changer. I think that’s a healthy thing. We don’t have this super tight hierarchy in the final say.
Jacques Testard : Literature in translation is booming. I think that’s partly the International Booker Prize. The Booker had commissioned a survey a few years ago to find out who’s reading in translation, and it turns out that people under 35 read more in translation than any other demographic.
Polly Barton: There’s a number of different factors that have brought this about. The increased visibility of a lot of indie publishers, Fitzcarraldo being an obvious example.
Han Zhang Credit: Mai Schotz Sam Fisher: I feel like it was the interest in Japanese literature that really started it, and Murakami being this huge superstar, at least in the noughties. I think perhaps publishers just got better at packaging things and making the case for translated fiction. When it comes to European translated fiction, I think Ferrante was really, really big in terms of giving people an interest.
Han Zhang: In the US, one detail you probably already know is that we more and more put translators’ credits on the cover. I’m buying a lot of Chinese-language books from China, from Taiwan, from Malaysia, from Singapore.
Vincenzo Latronico: The flip side is the need to pass through English. The English language is still the hub between languages. For instance, the Danish classic Tove Ditlessen was translated into Italian only after she was translated into English. Most of the translations of my book happened after the English.
Alia Hanna Habib: One of the most profound changes I’ve seen is the shrinking of book media. It used to be that strong reviews could make a book, so we had the term “review-driven books.” That still exists, but the chances of that are lower if there are fewer reviews and there’s not a sense of a critical consensus.
Morgan Entrekin: We’ve been in crisis for several years. AP stopped their book coverage a year ago, and then The Washington Post …but this has been building over 25 years. Every midsize city [newspaper] had a book section 25 years ago. They don’t now, or there are very few of them left. It’s just harder to make people aware of books.
Bryan Washington: If you’re writing from a marginalized vantage point—if you’re a Black author, if you’re an author who is a woman, if you’re a trans person or a queer person, it has been difficult to publish narratives in [the US] for some time, let alone to get in front of a reader. I think that layoffs in book criticism only exacerbate that, because we find ourselves in a situation in which editors and to some extent the remaining reporters want to keep their jobs, and one means of doing that is getting eyes on your piece. Underlining that need to keep their job for virality, you end up seeing a lot of the same books being talked about.
Maya Binyam: Language and literature are already so devalued in this country, and the percentage of people who read for pleasure is already so small.
I find it really upsetting that a books column for New York Magazine has a recurring feature where they ask people how they find time to read, as if finding time to read is like finding time to do something good for you, but kind of unpleasant. I don’t think time is the problem. I think the problem is that people are alienated from pleasure. It feels like the equivalent of asking, like, How do you find time to have sex ?
Valeria Luiselli: Every time I board an airplane or a subway car, and I’ve been doing this for years, I count how many people are reading a book. I used to even take pictures of them. It is really devastating to see how those numbers have shrunk. I see in one subway car on a good day, there’s one or maybe two people with a book. It used to be at least 10. You see an older generation who still brings books to planes, but I see no one in my age group and below reading.
Matthew Gasda: I think people are even reading less than they were two or three years ago. I heard one friend suggest that’s because algorithms are getting even better at feeding us content. The algorithm is so good at getting short-form text to you that it gets very hard to care about a book.
The rise of podcasts is kind of replacing books for men. Then there’s the question of whether men have been pushed out of the publishing industry, and then whether they’ve been pulled into podcasting. There’s push and pull.
Alia Hanna Habib Credit: Beowulf Sheehan Alia Hanna Habib: People who work in publishing need to be much more engaged with how books are taught. There’s been a lot of writing about students showing up in high school without being taught to read a whole book. It’s like learning to run a mile. You know you’re taught to read a whole book and to engage with it, and that that affects your whole life as a reader, your idea of what reading is for and the kind of pleasures it can give. We’re seeing the consequences of it.
R.F. Kuang: I am really exhausted by these apocalyptic headlines about the decline of literacy, the decline of reading for pleasure, and a total lack of interest in reading from young people. There have been so many think pieces and hot takes and chest-thumping on this topic, and I don’t want to diminish the scale of the problem. But I think the way that it’s being talked about is both incredibly condescending, and it feels like a thinly veiled topic for which people get to flaunt their cultural superiority. It completely ignores the fact that we all have a lot more agency in this than we think we do.
You have booksellers talking about how young people are coming in all the time asking for classics. You have these really lively reading communities on BookTok, and you have librarians, K-12 educators, university educators, and people who are not being featured in clickbaity headlines, doing everything they can to keep reading alive and flourishing. I wish we would talk about that, instead of another guy being like, “None of you can read and culture is dead.”
Ira Madison III: People are always talking about self-publishing. There are so many hit books that were self-published first.
Jordy Moblo: There are a lot of authors that have struggled to get into a traditional publishing pipeline, and for them to have an outlet like social media where their books can be discovered more easily, I think that’s really exciting. Dungeon Crawler Carl was self-published when I found it—those were self-published books up until 18 months ago, when it got a traditional publishing deal through Penguin Random House.
Sam Fisher: On the publishing side, things have got a lot more difficult in more quotidian, boring ways: paper prices, the lack of funding. It’s just got worse and worse and worse. I think people are starting to realize now the problem with paperback books is they’re almost the same price as they were 25 years ago, whereas costs have gone up by a factor. Even in the last two years, the price of printing a paperback has doubled, so the margins just get smaller and smaller and smaller, and that’s bad for presses, but it’s also bad for writers. It just means that there’s less to go around.
Jacques Testard: From Brexit, which has stopped us from selling books to the EU via direct sales, to the war in Ukraine and subsequent conflicts, which have an impact on oil prices that then have an impact on paper prices and therefore printing costs, it’s been a very difficult time for small businesses generally.
The biggest challenge is what it has always been, really, which is that publishing is a really difficult business. The business model is tried and tested, and however much people try to innovate, it’s always going to be a very low-margin business. [Fitzcarraldo Editions is] 12 years in now, and we’ve reached a level of stability, but we’re never a bad season or two away from serious trouble financially.
Naomi Kanakia: Five years ago, in literary fiction, if they gave an author a big advance and then put a marketing budget behind that author, there was a pretty good chance that when the book came out, it would be heavily covered by a fair number of media outlets. There would be some kind of buzz online, on Twitter usually, and there was a pretty good chance it could get awards attention. Then there would be some mass of readers who would respond to that kind of book. It felt like each year, there were maybe 100 to 200 books that big corporate publishers really put their weight behind, and maybe 10 to 20 would become something, and the authors would have careers.
Starting maybe two or three years ago, that really started to sputter. Those books began failing to get traction. The machine broke down, especially for debut novels. If you’re a debut novelist, the industry can’t make you into Emma Cline anymore.
Sean Thor Conroe: The gambling on the debuts is an issue.
Sam Fisher : The debut-novelist thing has been an eternal problem, and it’s a structural issue in the industry that so many debut novelists are kind of set up to fail. They’re in these advances they can never come close to paying off.
Editors now need to run their acquisitions by a large marketing team, by other editors. It’s now a team decision, and you can’t acquire good literature as a team.
Tom Willis: Big publishing is useless. All they do is buy on trends, it seems to me. They don’t seem to really know how to sell books. So the editorial class, I think, needs to become more diverse in taste and in general.
Alia Hanna Habib : I work at an agency where we represent high-profile fantasy series to serious nonfiction to cookbooks, and in the course of a given year, we see everything from five figures to seven figures. It’s impossible to answer that question.
Here’s the nuance: A publisher figures out what they’re going to pay for any book, especially a debut, based on the market of how books are selling. And increasingly, publishers do that by looking at the market on a very short timeline.
We’ve become, I think, too presentist in how we value books, instead of thinking this is an industry where we have really long tails, where things change.
Ira Madison III Credit: Steven Molina Contreras Ira Madison III: What I was told is that advances used to be in three installments pre-COVID, but now I believe they’re in four installments. Mine was low six figures. I don’t think I would be getting that advance today. I sold my book in 2021.
Joelle Owusu: It really does depend on so many things. One, whether the author has representation or not, because more experienced agents can be quite aggressive negotiators. It depends on whether there’s more than one publisher in on it, so you can kind of go into an auction situation, and that hikes up the price of the advance.
I understand that the books that are getting the most noise are the ones that say this author gets a six or seven figure deal. But I promise you, those are quite rare, and it really is for those super established authors, bar one or two exceptional debuts. It ranges from small five figures to five figures, maybe even up to six figures.
What the author should also consider, although it’s a lot harder for them, is one, whether the publisher cares about their career, publishing more than one book, and two, actually earning out the advance. Because we can throw 100,000 pounds at an author, but if they don’t make that back in sales, they will never see a royalty a day in their lives.
Sam Fisher : You still hear about people getting half a million occasionally in the UK, and then probably four times that in the US. But it really happens to one person a year now. I don’t think it really helps anyone. It occasionally works, you know, and the lucky writer who’s kind of been plucked by the hand of God gets incredibly rich. But most of the time, yeah, it’s just kind of an albatross for them.
Naomi Kanakia : I don’t know that, like, Emma Cline’s $2 million advance is still common, but it’s still pretty common for debut authors to get several $100,000 advances. But it’s always been the case that most people who get those kinds of advances don’t necessarily go on to have the kind of careers that they would like to have, or that are even sustainable. Now it feels like the odds are really quite bad. So you get that money, but, y’know—nothing happens next.
For years, there’s been a bunch of handwringing over the gender gap in the literary market and trends like “performative male reading.” So the question is: Do men read? If so, what? Morgan Entrekin: They never have read as much as women. The number that I’ve heard in terms of reading fiction is seven to one. And I heard that 40 years ago.
Chelsea Hodson : I don’t think about gender that much when I’m publishing or reading. I do think men read. I think that these pieces are just trying to create clickbait.
Bryan Washington: Gay men read. Queer people read. I don’t know what straight people read, though.
Ira Madison III: The gays are reading. I mean, they only seem to be reading Fruit Fly, and some of them The Disappearers.
Performative reading—I feel like that phrase got a lot of traction. But everything is performative when you assume that everyone is doing things for other people. Thinking something is performative is based on how you value performance. It says nothing about the other person. It says everything about you. You’re not reading Confederacy of Dunces at the bar because you feel self-conscious, but maybe this dude really just likes Confederacy of Dunces and wants to read at the bar.
Tom Willis: Performative male reading—that’s just nonsense. That’s internet crap. That’s great if you’re on Instagram, but it’s not real.
Sean Thor Conroe: I mean, it’s the mission! People always ask me. That’s my mission!
The fellas do read. They’re just not reading $30 colorful hardcovers that came out last week. I think the inclination is to read older books.
Vincenzo Latronico: There’s been a hype cycle around this, but for me this is not news. Do you think that men in the 1980s were really passionate about reading novels?
Smitty: What do we consider “reading,” and what do we consider “not reading”? Do we consider reading self-help? Do we consider the type of reading that we’re talking about on BookTok? I say yes. Some people say no, right. I do think there are men reading now. Do I think men are reading at the same clip as women? No.
Smitty Courtesy of Kensington Grey Men read self-help books, personal finance books, things that you know as a man can help you further your life, get better, and things like that. I feel like that’s always going to be number one. At a solid number two, I would say fantasy and sci-fi. I’ll even throw in historical fiction as number three.
Alia Hanna Habib: If men want to get laid, they should read. But yeah, statistically, men read less than women. I work a lot in nonfiction, and there’s been a decline in nonfiction. One of the postulations, is that those men, the men who historically were reading nonfiction, are now engaging with other media, whether it’s going to podcasts or watching YouTube or whatever.
Emma Straub: Of course men read. Less than women, we know that to be the case. But men are in my bookstore every day, and we treat them just like real people! The men who shop in my bookstore, they’re reading A Court of Thorn and Roses and they’re reading Dungeon Crawler Carl and they’re reading Patrick Radden Keefe.
Lauren Oyler: I mean, I only go out with douchebags who read a lot. They’re reading, like, serious translated European literature and old stuff.
I do think that in this conversation about “Do men read?,” men themselves who take up the mantle of being anti-woke crusaders actually engage in identity politics. So when these white guys are like, “There are no white men in literature,” they’re just doing identity politics, aren’t they? Literature that might draw men in probably has more to do with the subject matter than the race and gender of the people who are in the books.
Rumaan Alam : The statistics bear out what you’re asking, right? I guess I just can’t conceive of the impoverished kind of life that is being led by a mind that doesn’t care to read. And I don’t think you have to read Knausgård to call yourself a human being, but for Christ’s sake, read a newspaper.
The way this is put, it always ends up being, “Men can’t get a fair shake, we need more books about sports," or a midlife crisis or heterosexuality or whatever. It’s preposterous to say that.
Joelle Owusu Maybe what our institutions here, speaking of education principally, have failed to show [men] is that some of the most astonishing art of the last century has been about manhood. I read Updike’s Rabbit novels two years ago, and they are such a punch in the face emotionally and the most beautiful writing. If we need a male writer to rally the troops, why not Updike? Why not Roth? Why not Joseph Heller? Why not Richard Yates? There have been dozens of these guys. There have been dozens of these guys, so they had their shot. And the notion that the existence of Min Jin Lee or Teyari Jones is what’s threatening the next generation’s Updike is ridiculous. But that’s where this conversation always goes.
Joelle Owusu: Oh my God! I’ve only recently learned that they do. That’s really, really bad of me, but I’ve dated enough men with Rich Dad, Poor Dad to end it all, to be honest. But, no—men do read. I’m just so glad there are organizations like the Dope Readers Club, which bring together men, especially men of color, to read fiction, which I think is coming back in a big way for men across the world.
Grace Byron: The lit bro is definitely not extinct. Has a lit bro read any books by a trans author in the last decade? That’s my question. I’m not like, “You need to DEI your lit stack.” I’m not a fan of readathons based on specific identities. But at the same time, you should be reading outside of what your PhD thesis was on.
Chelsea Hodson : I first read Matthew Gasda, one of my authors, from reading his Substack, and I thought it was really interesting. I think that a lot of people do sell books there, yeah.
R.F. Kuang: I am on Substack. I don’t post all that frequently, but I find it a pretty convenient platform to to hit that spot when you don’t want to go through the trouble of pitching and then editing and thinking through a full length essay, but you don’t want to just toss out a very short social media post either. It’s like that Goldilocks spot where you have a lot and it’s kind of halfway developed, and you'd like to share it and talk to some people about it, but you’re not trying to work that argument out into a publishable essay.
Hua Hsu: I have a Substack where I review old magazines, because I collect old magazines and there’s no other place to write about them. I feel like a platform like that should exist for projects that would make no sense in any other form.
Sean Thor Conroe Credit: Al Jacobs Sean Thor Conroe: I think that people are yearning for different ways to approach literature that’s a little less institutional. I have some good friends who go really hard on Substack. I do think it’s a good outlet. These apps and these mediums come and go, but it’s been a good avenue for me to write things that I wouldn’t be able to put elsewhere. I have been doing a podcast with Harold Rogers, and his Substack has led to [Farrar, Straus and Giroux] picking up his book.
Alia Hanna Habib: It depends on your book. If you’re writing literary fiction, if you are Ben Lerner, do you need to be on TikTok? No. But there are exceptions to every rule. I think that platform can really be an amazing engine for selling books. I think one of the reasons Yesteryear , for example, is doing so well. I mean, it’s a really fun, smart book, but people already knew the author because she has a very popular podcast. Certainly that helped.
Ottessa Moshfegh : No! There’s an argument you can pose in the opposite way—if people can read my writing on Substack, why should they go buy a $27 hardcover?
People who are willing to pay to read my stuff? There are very few of them. I have less than 1,000 paid subscribers, and I have, like, 65,000 followers.
I was kind of scared that my publishers would find out I was on Substack. I thought I was doing something outside of what I do—that’s why I liked it. It felt alternative as a space online.
Grace Byron : I have a very ambivalent relationship to Substack. With the development of Notes, it’s become a watered-down or specific sector of Twitter that’s migrating to do lit drama on Substack. Becca Rothfeld has rightly said that there’s a drawback to not having an editor or a fact-check. For me, [it’s useful] if I didn’t place something someplace in time, or if I don’t want to worry about the house style of a certain magazine. So there is a freedom for writers that can be productive.
For me the downside about it is, when does the echo chamber end? You can’t just keep writing an essay about an essay about an essay. That to me feels really boring. And then it becomes an echo chamber about the discourse du jour.
Maya Binyam Credit: Eli Rudavsky Sufiyaan Salam: It’s just feeling to me like a Twitter specifically for annoying literary types. I have a Substack account, but I barely use it. I also don’t ever put writing stuff on it. I occasionally will share drawings or something. It does make me realize why editors are such an important part of writing.
Maya Binyam: I hate Substack. I honestly feel like whenever I see someone has started a Substack, I’m like, Are you okay? Are you going through something? I think people do good things on on Substack—I like the ones that are more diaristic. I’m just like, Why don’t you keep a diary? There’s something so special about private writing, and that’s totally undervalued.
Joelle Owusu: I actually think fewer writers should be on Substack. I totally understand that it’s a way to make money and a way to be seen doing things, but I think you should only do it if you genuinely like it, because if you have a dead Substack that is either boring or not kept up and just looks a little bit dodgy, it’s just not a good vibe at all. Substack just isn’t for everyone, and it’s okay.
Bryanne Hoeg : It’s, in some ways, making books. You know, I would say the reason why Heated Rivalry got made is because that book blew up on TikTok, for example. It’s also making really old books very popular again. Lonesome Dove is having a real hot moment right now. That book was published 40 years ago.
R.F. Kuang: I still feel the same way about BookTok and Bookstagram and a lot of other video platforms as I did years ago when some of my books started getting traction on those sites. I think they function best as reader spaces and as spaces where readers and critics and reviewers are talking to each other. I think the conclusion that a lot of people in publishing drew when BookToks started gaining influence was that authors all need to be on these platforms now and be personally promoting their own work. I have lots of colleagues who do this a lot and really enjoy it. I found that I can’t do that, be heavily engaged in those platforms, and also keep the focus for my own work.
Emma Straub: BookTok sells books in sometimes surprising directions. Just this week, my husband, who does our reorders at the store, said to me, “We’ve been selling a lot of copies of Stoner .” And it’s BookTok!
R.F. Kuang: I think, stereotypically, people are like, "Oh, BookTok books are romance or romantasy or whatever.” But I don’t think that accurately accounts for all of these hidden gems finding new lives all the time. I think a really optimistic way to read it is that you just have passionate readers, and they have eclectic and fun tastes. Sometimes, the best use case of these communities is somebody being like, "I found, like, the weirdest shit from the 1920s that no one’s ever heard of, and I’m making it my personal mission for everybody to read this now.” I think that’s awesome.
Emma Straub Credit: Alpha Smoot Eden Yonas : BookTok is a very safe space for romance readers, and that’s kind of what it started with. But with time, as more people come in, because romance is a genre that’s been ridiculed for so many years, even though it’s the most popular genre, I think that with time, you see a little bit more judgment, even as it gains popularity, which is interesting.
Jacques Testard: [TikTok does sell books], but I think it’s impossible to manufacture from the publishing end. Zombie books do very well on TikTok, apparently. We do actually have a book that could be read as a zombie novel, Anne de Marcken’s It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over. And that’s done really quite well for us, and I think part of it is TikTok.
Sufiyaan Salam: Sadly I got TikTok for the first time this year, to promote the book, basically. And you know what? It’s gone well for me. I barely watch TikToks. Same reason I’m not trying to do heroin right now. Busy.
But when the book came out, my goal was to post at least one TikTok every day. Some of those videos [got] a couple 100,000 views, and lots of comments about how they never heard about the book until this one random video. So I’ve definitely got a bunch of sales out of it, which is cool.
Jordan Moblo: TikTok has acted as an equalizer in some ways, where it has surfaced not the best books but the books that are escapist, the books that are hopeful, have wish fulfillment, the books that are more feeling-based than anything, right? It’s vibes. It’s “This book made me cry my face off.” It’s “This book scared the shit out of me.” “This book fucked me up.” “This book broke my brain.”
Smitty: There’s more genres being talked about by more people. I don’t think this is one of the spaces where it can’t get oversaturated, because they’re making books every day, and there’s books that people have never read in the past, right?
This summer, the Commonwealth Prize was given to a short story that was likely written by or with AI , setting off a wave of concern in the publishing world. Are you having any AI anxiety? Alia Hanna Habib : This is what it’s like to have AI discourse as part of publishing: It is like living with a really flatulent dog, where you’re just having a conversation with your partner about something that actually interests you, but the dog keeps farting, and you can’t not acknowledge that your dog won’t stop farting. It’s just in the room.
Valeria Luiselli: My big question is, will readers be indifferent to whether a book was written by a human or AI and just read whatever comes to them? Or will the majority of readers take a stand? What will happen then to so many writers and their work when the market becomes clustered with very efficient and entertaining books written by robots, who, by the way, stole our work in order to learn to write? That’s still lingering.
I have yet another email from the Anthropic Copyright Settlement today, this ongoing class action suit that we’re in, suing Anthropic for stealing our work. That damage is done. Even if we win the settlement, everyone’s getting, like, a small sum of money, it doesn’t really compensate for the fact that our work was stolen and used to then create work.
Polly Barton Credit: Shinchosha Maya Binyam: I really wanted to pretend that these AI tools didn’t exist, and I kind of succeeded in that for a while. But in the two years that I wasn’t paying attention, I’ve been really alarmed at the rate that it seems to be diminishing people’s capacities for thought.
Polly Barton: Particularly as a translator, I would be mad not to have anxiety. Yes for translation, but yes for writing, editing, audiobook narrating, et cetera. Do I think that AI will be worthy of [replacing] my most successful and competent peers? No. But I do think it will be used to try to do that, and it already is, by some corners of the industry.
Vincenzo Latronico: I do have anxiety about AI replacing translators, cover artists, line editors, but this is not a problem of AI. This is a problem of cost cutting strategies in management. The problem is not AI. The problem is management.
Lauren Oyler: Just, like, on a conceptual level, I think thinking about AI and media theory in general is much more interesting than thinking about Sally Rooney’s novels. But I think a lot of people who talk about AI, particularly in the literary world, do not understand anything about it. So the conversation is pretty siloed, or it hits a dead end quite quickly.
This is not my argument, but this is the common argument, that literary fiction will become like opera, or a sort of niche cultural interest that only the very well educated or particularly interested people take part in. I can’t worry about it that much, because I have to keep working!
Sometimes I do panic, and I’m like, “Oh no, I’m finally doing exactly what I want to do, and now it’s all going to blow up in a robot orgy or whatever.” But I just don’t worry about it that much, because there’s nothing you can do, right? There’s really nothing you can do, to be honest, and I would rather worry about, like, boys. There’s nothing you can do about boys either, but at least you can feel like you’re doing something about it.
Joelle Owusu: I can’t speak on behalf of Penguin, but personally, just because I’m a Black woman and I work in publishing, and there are so few Black people in senior positions like I’m in, I can’t ignore the fact that a lot of these AI conversations, and who’s called out for allegedly using AI, are mostly Black and brown people. It’s just so hard to tell if it’s true or not, or the extent that it’s been used, or whether it hasn’t been used. And it’s so hard to disprove, because once it’s out there that someone has doubted that you’ve written this, you are tarnished, whether it’s true or not, which is really hard mentally for so many writers who’ve spent years perfecting their craft and writing this book. So I really feel for authors, especially authors of color, because there’s now this extra obstacle they’re now going to have to consider, where anyone, with no real evidence, can say “Let me just see if it’s AI or not.”
It’s just made our lives a lot harder, basically, whether you work in publishing or you’re a writer. And I think it’s that I do believe it’s disproportionate, and I think it’s unfair, and I’m not sure about where it’s going. I really feel for authors, and I feel for publishers as well, because it puts us in a tricky position where we’re still trying to figure out our position on it, and I don’t think any publisher has gotten it right so far. But I also don’t think any publisher has gotten it wrong or really understands what’s happening. But I do believe that authors of color are being disproportionately targeted because they’re receiving awards and praise for their books, and I don’t think that’s fair.
Chelsea Hodson : I do not have anxiety about it. I think that it’s inevitable, but if you’ve actually engaged with AI, you can see that there are certain things it cannot replace. The type of writing that I’m interested in reading, writing, and publishing is informed by very human things like loss, grief, heartbreak, birth, death, things that I do not believe AI has a full grasp on yet. And I think that readers are too smart to think that AI will just replace that. AI can probably write a really interesting book, but it’s one that I would never willingly read.
Hua Hsu Credit: Alex Hodor Lee Hua Hsu: There is this possibility where AI is compelling writers to think about what actually makes their perspective or their voice unique, and hopefully it can be a creative spur in that way. I think it’s inevitable that when confronted with this technology, a lot of us are wondering, “What’s the point of anything?”
A friend of mine who lives in Silicon Valley was saying that he has friends who just use AI to generate continuations of series that their kids are into, like Diary of a Wimpy Kid or something.
R.F. Kuang: Just talking about novels that are primarily generated by an LLM—I don’t really think there’s a market space for them, and the reason why is almost shockingly obvious. Publishing doesn’t have a supply-side problem. It has never had a supply-side problem. There are far more bad manuscripts, or even just okay manuscripts, generated every year by human writers that readers are not interested in, or publishers don’t want to publish.
Ed Park: It’s hard for me to imagine somebody wanting to be a literary novelist and even think about using AI. It just seems like that’s not the way to do it.
There was a long gap between my two novels—my second novel came out in 2023 and it took me nine years. In some ways I’m like, “Wow that’s a large chunk of my life. What if I could have done it in two years or something?” But I don’t think it would have been as good, because I think there is something about being on that road. I don’t think there are really any shortcuts that AI can provide that would be at all meaningful.
Nelio Biedermann: Knausgaard said this thing about how AI has never kissed someone and that’s why it’ll never be able to create literature that really moves people. I think this belief is kind of naive—it doesn’t have to feel anything; it can just copy it. I don’t think that people will really notice, because it draws from real experiences. Obviously it won’t create something groundbreakingly real. But most books don’t.
Sam Fisher: We have to become better readers. We have a responsibility to notice these things, referencing the obvious elephant in the room, the Commonwealth story. I mean, you know, with apologies to the judges, it wasn’t a particularly good story. I think that perhaps just as people needed to become more attuned to spotting disinformation, we need to engage with these technologies so we can understand how to spot them.
Eden Yonas: I think that’s the scariest thing, aside from what’s kind of already happening, is the fact that a lot of us don’t have confirmation of whether something is or is not AI. That’s the scariest part, the lack of disclosure. I think it’s important for us to know.
AI is something that people view as a resource that could bridge a lack of accessibility in artistic spaces, but I do think that we should be very careful about that, particularly because any time that you use something as a crutch, it’s time that you could be using to work on the actual craft.
Morgan Entrekin: We’ve inserted a clause [in our contracts] that none of this is generated by AI. But you can’t do a Google search without using AI, right? So is that called “using AI,” when you’re doing a Google search to see if your character in London is using a certain kind of hat? Of course, but it’s not using AI to write the prose.
Ottessa Moshfegh Courtesy of the author Ottessa Moshfegh: I think people are being a little bit silly. AI is a kind of technology that we created, right? And whether it’s going to hurt us in some ways or help us in others, that’s a given. Of course, it’s going to be kind of complicated. It’s gonna make people be able to do their jobs faster, yeah, maybe we will lose some people. But that’s how civilizations evolve. They don’t stay exactly the same forever. Certainly it’s going to change writing. Mostly it’s going to affect copywriting—things that don’t have an authorial identity. You can already see it, but like, who cares? Like, AI-generated YouTube Shorts or TikToks and stuff—yeah, they can be annoying, but so is everything.
Chelsea Hodson: I’m speaking as someone who has an MFA and has taught on the faculty at an MFA program. I think that they can be great places to take your writing more seriously, but I do not think that they are required.
Emma Straub: MFAs are a beautiful, beautiful, beautiful way to spend your time if you are able. Do they matter? No, I don’t think they’ve ever mattered, except to the writer.
Grace Byron: I did not get an MFA. I don’t feel strongly that people need to get an MFA. But for people who need discipline to write or start their journey, it can be really helpful. I think, obviously, getting an MFA at Iowa still holds a lot of appeal to editors and agents. But I don’t think of it as the only way. There just aren’t a lot of rules anymore.
Matthew Gasda: Yes, but for those who can afford it. It’s pay to play.
Matthew Gasda Bryan Washington: I’m someone who was very fortunate to receive thoughtful mentorship in my MFA. So in the sense that it can serve as a productive window of time in which someone who wants to write or someone who is an artist in a country that is very hostile to writers and artists, can do that, I would say yes. The addendum that I would say for that is that I am very strongly against losing money for an MFA. I would not recommend that someone lose money or take on debt to enter an MFA at this time.
Ira Madison III: I think that anybody who wants to improve their craft and workshop with other people, definitely go to an MFA if you can afford it or you can get a scholarship.
Valeria Luiselli: I’m like a newborn Christian to the MFA system. I myself did not go through an MFA. I always thought that an MFA was just a system to sink poor American students into further debt and give them the illusion that they would one day publish. My sensation now that I teach at the NYU MFA is that students form these very intricate and beautiful communities there, where they learn to read deeper together. A lot of people form those bonds either with peers or with mentor figures, and I think that those two things are important, as well as just having more time to read and write when you’re at a crucial stage in your life.
Grace Byron: Definitely you’re seeing a rise across the country in “hip” readings, readings as cool or as aesthetic. Parties are a big part of that. N+1 really pioneered that model of chic parties and galas, and The Drift really took that one and really made it a thing. The Drift parties are a very sexy, alluring thing that could be viewed as exclusive or stylish. And those magazines are also publishing a lot of great stuff to back it up.
Tom Willis: I would go down to New York on the weekends, and I went to this one party, the Forever Magazine launch of Bud Smith’s novel Teenager at this Art Deco ballroom. There was a rain falling outside, and we were drinking old-fashioneds, and I was around loads of great writers, and then we went to Clandestino. I just couldn’t believe you could have a night that starts at seven and ends at 4 a.m., hanging around with great writers and partying. I was mesmerized. Then I moved to London, and I was like, “I want that energy, that democratic, youthful, open scene.”
It started really small in Soho, so that’s why it’s called the Soho Reading Series. I immediately brought American writers because New York at that time had all the energy, and that injected a lot of enthusiasm and energy from the start. And it’s just organically grown.
There are a lot of historical forces at play. Boredom with the internet, a willingness to go outside. The Trump exodus of Americans to England. Instead of getting sucked into New York, this American energy is getting sucked into London all of a sudden, because of immigration policy, geopolitics and stuff like that, that ties that to a general rebirth of print culture.
Matthew Gasda: That [renaissance] came from Dimes Square. Tom Willis and I were friends back in New York, and I remember him saying, “I’m copying this and taking it to London,” very intentionally.
You can do Dimes Square season one in other cities. You bring edgier, risky, or controversial, not even writers, but like tones, or words, and you kind of shock people who are stuck in 2019-brain. You let it be sexy, people do drugs and drink. It’s actually just normal literary culture, but it’s branded. You take something that would have been completely normal in 1997 and make it, like, new, and it’s genuinely fun. It’s the right thing to do! I enjoy those environments; I think people are happier.
Sufiyaan Salam Credit: Alina Akbar The downside is that people feel they have to Instagram it, and that always kills the moment. It becomes a meme. And then it dies and then it comes back once people have forgotten that it’s a meme. These cycles are about 8 to 16 months. A couple seasons, then it starts to fade, then the hangers-on come, and the opportunists.
Tom Willis: You hear the word community a lot, but I don’t know that it’s a community. Like a community, there’s trust. You live near each other, you share sugar. That’s not what we’re doing. We’re hanging out at the same bars, we’re sleeping with each other and making friends and publishing each other. I don’t think that’s a community so much as a scene. People are allergic to the word scene .
Sufiyaan Salam: I’ve done a bunch of cool events this year, which some of my non-bookish friends are surprised, like “Oh, whoa, there’s a cool DJ, you’re gonna read there, and the night is a cool party still?” At the Soho Reading Series and those events, I’ve found people who seem really cool or unapproachable and then they’ll nerd out with you about your book or other books. It can only be a good thing.
Matt Star: We started Dream Baby three and a half years ago. I had started writing poetry, and I tried to immerse myself in the scene and couldn’t really find a place for myself. It was very MFA-heavy—and nothing’s wrong with that. I just didn’t have that relationship to literature, and I was looking for something more exciting and alive.
I basically threw the event I wanted to go to. There was this beautiful gay-porn shop in the East Village, Blue Door Video, and I just thought it would be interesting to, you know, collectively read erotica, because when you read it out loud, it becomes very funny versus when you’re reading it alone in bed. Then we did it again at the Penn Station Sbarro, which was considered the saddest place in New York City, and 300, 400 people show up again, and The New York Times writes about it, and it just it kept growing, and we realized that, like, there was an appetite for this style of reading, an event that we wanted that prioritized fun and community.
I really want our readings and events to feel kind of like the WWE.
Emma Straub : I’m 46 years old and married with children and two bookstores. If it starts after 7 p.m., I’m not interested. But I have some friends who are cool, and they go to Dream Baby Press and do readings at an abandoned Burger King. And thank God—I love knowing that that is happening.
Morgan Entrekin: I was at the red-hot center in the late ’70s and ’80s. I loved being at Elaine’s with Plimpton and Vonnegut and Norman Mailer and Gay Talese and then hanging out with Gary Fiskejohn, Jay McInerney, and Bret Ellis. And a book came out of it—I signed [Candace Bushnell’s] Sex and the City at midnight at the Bowery Bar after a party for Will Self. It’s a young person’s thing. But at Elaine’s, it was all ages, and I don’t think that exists anymore, and I don’t think it exists in London either.
Lauren Oyler: That’s not a thing in Berlin, because we can just go to regular parties that are pretty good! I’ve done an event that Tom organized, and it was really great—but you can tell in New York and London that people are kind of desperate for something kind of glamorous and exciting to infuse the literary world.
Vincenzo Latronico Credit: Federico Ciamei Vincenzo Latronico: This is something that I and all the writers in Milan I am in contact with have observed with a kind of envy, because this hasn’t really happened here yet. Except for the Miu Miu Literary Club, which is a very unique event, including the lavish sponsoring. There are quite a few people who would like to replicate something like that in Milan. I mean, I haven’t been, so maybe it’s just a bunch of poseurs, but I would be excited to go!
Maya Binyam: I did this reading in L.A. It was a couple years ago at this point, but it was a reading series that has attracted a lot of media attention. After I did this reading, a bunch of people came up to me, and they were like, "I love reading.” I guess it’s sweet that they like to read, but they were saying it as if reading was a new hobby that they had picked up. I think these literary scenes are not representative of literary life because most people who read, it’s a private thing or it’s a thing that they share amongst their friends.
Joelle Owusu: There is actually a renaissance. Yes, it’s become more glossy. Yes, more brands are hopping on. But yeah, why not? People want community more than anything. Yes, some of it can be quite performative, but people just want to sit in a room, not be judged for once, have low lighting, be around people who have similar interests, and just spend a moment being immersed in culture. I think people just need to just relax a little bit. If you don’t want to go, don’t go. Just try it out because you might meet someone cool. You might meet the love of your life who’s into reading, and you know, sail off into the sunset.
Walker Iversen: Anything that can get people engaged in a unique way is good, but I do think, in some of the pieces [about these readings], there’s an untrue criticism being levied at [traditional] book events, that they’re stuffy or rote or boring. For people in the book world, yeah, you probably attend a lot of them, and the format of them that we all follow, that that we have followed since the beginning of the book tour as a concept, might seem a little dry, but I think that a lot of the people that I encounter on a day-to-day basis, they’re not going to readings all the time. So there is some novelty for people attending these.
Ira Madison III: Limousine has the best individual readings. But my favorite readings to go to are by friend Mikey Friedman. He runs Stage Break, where an author will have a short story or an excerpt from their upcoming book, then it’s four other people on stage with the reader. Then each person reads a page until they finish it. I love it.
Sam Fisher: Tom’s events [Soho Reading Series] are really good! Bookshops are still doing really great. The LRB ’s reading events are still just some of the best, like consistently, always really, really good and really high quality. The Fitzcarraldo Summer Party has been really good. And Palfest at Ibraaz Bookshop is putting on really good readings.
Sufiyaan Salam: Tom Willis is the GOAT, and there’s one in Manchester called Read Room. That one seems like it might be the coolest one in the country.
Joelle Owusu: Will Hunter just started Commonplace, which I think is amazing.
Jacques Testard: New York has never not had a vibrant literary scene. Berlin is interesting because there are so many expats there. We have quite a few authors who live in Berlin. Italian publishing is really interesting at the moment; there’s great stuff coming out of Milan and Rome.
Chelsea Hodson: I’ve seen a lot of great things happen in Baltimore. I know a lot of people in the Los Angeles literary scene. Wherever you go, there’s great scenes.
Tom Willis: Definitely Dublin. It’s just had such a big 10 years. I think people are talking about it less. But so many books are coming out of Dublin still.
Bryanne Hoeg Bryanne Hoeg: Portland! Obviously because of Powell’s—we’re the largest independent bookstore in the US, or the world—but we also just have a really strong contingent of local writers, small publishers, independent publishers. We just had Portland Book Week last week. There’s, like, more than 100 independent bookstores and comic book stores in the city, which is crazy per capita.
Joelle Owusu: I’m a South London supremacist. I say it proudly. I generally think there’s something really special about London. Yeah, Berlin. Berlin’s also amazing. New York City is amazing. Lagos, Nigeria, incredible. Accra is on the come up as well. But nothing beats London.
Matthew Gasda: I would predict Montreal will have the next scene-assaince. It’s cheaper, it’s vaguely exotic, and it’s got elements of Berlin to it. It’s got a cultural infrastructure. Music scenes predict where literary scenes pop up. If a city can support a music scene or a rave scene, it can support a literary scene.
Sufiyaan Salam: London does seem to be where it’s at in terms of a real literary scene. [But] the few events I’ve done up in Manchester have always had the most passionate crowd, the crowds with the best questions.
Sam Fisher: It’s East London, isn’t it? You can’t throw a shoe without hitting a novelist or poet.
Valeria Luiselli: Buenos Aires is the gold standard. There are more than 100 independent bookstores in Buenos Aires.
R.F. Kuang: I live in Boston, and I think the literary scene here is fantastic because you have both a really robust creative community, a very robust academic community, and a ton of incredible indie bookstores. In the same week, you could go see a talk by Stephen Graham Jones on his new horror novel and then go listen to a constitutional law professor talking about the collapse of democracy.
When Giancarlo DiTrapano, founder of Tyrant Books, died in 2021, there was an outpouring of grief from the literary community about the role, often undersung, of editors like him in getting new writers published. Where has that community gone? Sean Thor Conroe: Gian was just the last punk. I think maybe the energy around making a video talking about a book personally, or writing a Substack with your immediate impressions that’s not so polished, is sort of trying to operate within that ethic. I can’t help but try to continue his vision.
Chelsea Hodson Credit: Amelia Gray Chelsea Hodson: There was no one like him, and I don’t think that he will ever be replaced. He was someone that not only was a great editor, but he was also really great at finding new talent. He would be on Twitter and see someone tweeting in an interesting way and then DM them and ask, “Hey, are you writing a book? You seem like a writer to me.”
When someone like that dies, [you see] how much he touched people’s lives. He was such an important force, and almost exclusively behind the scenes. All these people came out to be like, He was helping me with my book. Because he believed in me for Tyrant books, it set me on a path to have a career as a writer. It’s so incredible that he could die relatively young and have had such an influence. It made me think about what’s my role in culture? Maybe I could be an advocate for people in this way.
Bryanne Hoeg: There are a lot of writers that I can think of who do a lot to uplift and support other writers locally: Lydia Yuknavich is one of them.
Joelle Owusu: Margaret Busby. She was the first Black woman publisher in the UK with her publisher Allison and Busby. She’s in her 80s. I see her at every event that champions literature, people of color, new writers, debut authors, everything. She’s a legend.
Ira Madison III: Mikey Friedman really does a lot to help newer authors, queer and diverse authors, get their work out there.
Sufiyaan Salam: For sure: Stormzy . London Writers Centre does a lot of great work as well.
R.F. Kuang: The line of translated fiction from Chinese to English that Han Zhang is spearheading at Riverhead. To see such an established imprint take Chinese language fiction so seriously and really throw their weight behind acquiring and marketing strong titles has been cool to see.
Hua Hsu: Does everyone say Dua Lipa ? I didn’t quite understand how big Dua Lipa’s book club was until I received a phishing attempt from someone posing to be Dua Lipa, and then I posted on Instagram as a joke, and the engagement on that was was eye-opening to me. I didn’t realize that many people were invested in Dua Lipa’s book club.
Another person I think is an ally is Héctor Béllerin. He’s an incredibly fashionable and cool Spanish football player. Last year he just started posting these novels he was reading. He had really interesting taste, and it sort of fit his whole aesthetic that he would be into cool literature. It was nice to see an athlete who wasn’t reading 48 Laws of Power .
Smitty: Sports figures reading. Wemby reads Brandon Sanderson; he has a book club. When Wemby walks onto the court with a book, a kid seeing that, and they’re gonna want to do that same thing. You have AJ Brown, football, reading a book on the sideline.
Naomi Kanakia: Jackson Howard at FSG. He’s got the magic. He knows how to publish writers who are still cool, and it is very genuinely impressive. If big corporate literary publishing lasts at all, it’ll be because of him.
Ed Park Credit: Beowulf Sheehan Bryan Washington: Nicole Chung and Kiese Laymon. They share their time and their guidance and are just very thoughtful in how they approach the industry, but also how they approach people, which can be rare.
Tom Willis: The Toerag , New Papers , and Die Quieter Please are minting the new generation of great British writers.
Ed Park: There’s an independent publisher called Transit Books out in the Bay Area. They’re devoted to works in translation—I think any publisher where they make translation a key part of their mission is doing an invaluable service.
Sam Fisher : Robert Loyco Greer, who’s a publicist at Profile. He started the Desperate Literature Prize, and he organized this event called New Canons, where they had eight presses, and it was kind of like a chat show. He’s just a supporter of anything strange and beautiful.
Jordan Moblo: Kennedy Ryan’s doing an incredible job of helping platform authors that have struggled to get into a traditional pipeline in a way that I haven’t seen before and is just a champion of books.
Matt Star: PEN America. They stand up for free speech, they stand against book banning.
Rumaan Alam: I would be remiss if I didn’t say my editor, Sarah McGrath, who is a genius. I can’t believe she’ll take my calls, let alone publish my work.
Valeria Luiselli: John Freeman has had such an impact on so many writers. He often sees a book before the writer even realizes they’re gonna write it, just out of a couple of conversations.
Sufiyaan Salam: Lemara Lindsay-Prince, who used to work at #Merky and now has got her own studio, Studio Lemara.
Tom Willis: Anna Kelly at Little Brown is really good.
Polly Barton: Jess Chandler from Prototype is an absolute powerhouse.
Matthew Gasda: Probably the Fitzcarraldo guy .
Lauren Oyler: Jacques Testard, I guess. Obviously.
Jacques Testard: Kishani Widyaratna, 4th Estate, who has excellent taste and has published some brilliant books over the years.
Han Zhang: I have to say ourselves! Riverhead.
Matt Star: Far West Press . It’s more or less a one-man team, his name’s Willie [Crane]. He’s a champion of punks and older writers and people on the fringes.
Maya Binyam: NYRB, FSG, Hagfish, and Fitzcarraldo.
Joelle Owusu: I’ve got to say Fitzcarraldo Editions.
Valeria Luiselli: I read almost anything that Fitzcarraldo publishes.
Best critic? Ed Park: I like Christian Lorentzen. Merve Emre.
R.F. Kuang: I love Patricia Lockwood’s criticism. I’m just a big Patricia Lockwood fan in general. I love her novels, too.
Ira Madison III: Tembe Denton-Hurst and Grace Byron.
Grace Byron: Anahid Nersessian is one of the best critics working today. I’m a huge Andrea Long Chu fan. Doreen St. Felix and Jamie Hood.
Vincenzo Latronico: Olga Campofreda. She was an academic, and she has started being a transmission chain between academic discourse and more mainstream literary conversation. She was called, out of the blue, by Miuccia Prada, to start the Miu Miu literary club. What she’s doing is extremely precious.
Emma Straub: Ron Charles has always been my favorite. The Washington Post —what a decision to make, what a loss. I am so glad to see that he has truly not missed a beat in reviewing books on his Substack . I will read him forever.
Naomi Kanakia: Dog Eared in San Francisco.
Bryan Washington: In Tokyo, I’d say Featherheart Books and Loneliness Books. In the US, I’m really fond of Loyalty Books, East Bay Booksellers, and Reparations Club.
R.F. Kuang: Narrative in Somerville is a newer independent bookstore that is focused on diverse titles, and in addition to being everybody’s new favorite bookstore in town. The vibes are so good. It’s so welcoming. They’ve also become a very important community organizing space.
Valeria Luiselli: Shakespeare and Company in Paris for books in English. For books in Spanish, I could name 100, and they’re all in Buenos Aires. I’ll give you two really important ones: Eterna Cadencia and the Ateneo.
Emma Straub: My own, because I have the keys and I can go whenever I want.
Alia Hanna Habib: Books and Books in Miami, and my local Community Bookstore in Park Slope.
Hua Hsu: I love Community Books, which is near me. Unnameable Books is my favorite used bookstore. And Yu & Me Books in Chinatown—it’s just, like, a clubhouse, that has the best vibe and the best hidden backroom of any store on the planet.
LeVar Burton LeVar Burton: Octavia’s Bookshelf in Pasadena. This shop uplifts BIPOC authors and female voices and highlights titles we might never see in other bookstores. But don’t get me wrong—it’s not all about the politics. It’s a genuine bang-up bookstore, only with an intention to spread the good word.
Jacques Testard: LaLa Books in Camberwell [South London].
Smitty: Charm City Books in Baltimore and the Archive in Charleston, South Carolina.
Morgan Entrekin: Three Lives and City Lights.
Nelio Biedermann: Daunt [London, England].
Han Zhang: There are a lot of nice bookstores. I’m just saying one that I visited that really left an impression: JF Bookstore in [Washington] DC.
Polly Barton: Storysmith in Bristol [England].
Matt Star: I love Left Bank Books in the West Village, I love Sweet Pickle Books, Mast Books in the East Village.
Eden Yonas: Liz’s Book Bar [in Brooklyn]. I love bookstores that are also third spaces. I also love Book Club Bar [in Manhattan’s East Village] as well; they just opened up a location in Bushwick.
Lauren Oyler: Desire Lines Books [in Berlin]. It’s great and it’s right on the canal.
Sean Thor Conroe: I like McNally Jackson. I like the people that work there; they’re great.
Jordy Moblo: Madeline Cash, who had this incredible debut, Lost Lambs. And Amy Tintero had this incredible book called Listen for the Lie.
Hua Hsu: The crime writer John MacDonald, his Travis McGee series.
Sufiyaan Salam: The thing I’m reading right now is Sofia Montrone’s Nymph , which is incredible.
Valeria Luiselli: Sarah Torres. She wrote a beautiful book called Erotic Thinking .
Bryan Washington: Jose Ando’s Jackson Alone was published in English from Japanese very recently. I really enjoyed that book. Also Tetsuya Nomura’s Spent Bullets and Hafni Says by Helle Helle. And Nao-Cola Yamazaki. They have been writing in Japan for some time, but they just had their books published in English very recently.
Grace Byron: Harriet Armstrong and Cora Lewis.
Ira Madison III: Raven Leilani. I read Luster finally this year and it was fantastic.
Han Zhang: Lee Chia-Yang, A Perfect Day to Put Your Head in the Oven .
Walker Iversen: August Lamb. She has a book up and coming with Knopf. It is someone who has a completely fresh perspective on how to live differently in the 21st century.
Eden Yonas: Between Friends and Lovers by Shirlene Obuobi.
Lauren Oyler: I read this Lena Dunham–esque book by this Dutch author named Yente Poshima called People With Charisma . That was really good.
Vincenzo Latronico: Makenna Goodman. Helen of Nowhere really struck a chord with me.
Bryanne Hoeg: Gabrielle Tallent. I really like his new book Crux.
Hua Hsu: I’m sure autofiction as a term will die, but we’re living in such subjective, main-character-energy times that it just seems unlikely that people will stop mining their own lives for storytelling.
Valeria Luiselli: Unfortunately no, and I’m part of the problem.
Sufiyaan Salam: Well I haven’t seen the sales figures for Life of M , but I’m assuming not.
Ira Madison III: No! Everybody was yapping about that Life of M book! I also think the definition of autofiction and who’s considered autofiction needs to be expanded by critics, because it’s usually only a cluster of the same white literary writers. Autofiction and experimentations with form have been a trademark of Black literary works for years, and Black authors don’t get lumped into the autofiction category, even though they’ve written it for a long time.
R.F. Kuang: I don’t think we ever defined well what autofiction was. I’m reading Life of M now and enjoying it greatly, so it’s alive and well for me.
Oyler Moblo: No, it just needs to be advanced.
Matthew Gasda: Irrelevant; 2021-style autofiction is basically passé, but certainly people are going to have to mine their lives for things not found on the internet to be interesting. Writing will remain intensely personal because stories have been subsumed by memes and the internet. Grand historical narratives don’t make sense.
Nelio Biedermann: Autofictional literature is [still] kind of new, it wouldn’t have been possible 200 years ago. If AI can create almost anything, even very good literature, then maybe autofiction will rise even more because there you have the personal connection, and it’s more likely that it was written by a real person.
Where are we on the DFW index? Is it still annoying to be really into him? Ottessa Moshfegh: Yes.
Ira Madison III: No, actually. I feel like gays are into him now. But I think it’s cooler to be into his essays and short stories.
Ed Park: I don’t think it was ever annoying. More people should read him.
Valeria Luiselli: This question betrays your age. I don’t think this is a thing anymore.
Sam Fisher: I think less so than it was 10 years ago. It was always a joke at the bookshop—you’d be pretty nervous recommending it to someone because of, like, the memeability of it. I think George Saunders has become the new David Foster Wallace in that sense.
Matthew Gasda: I’ve never been a huge fan, personally, but canceling dead people is insane. Obviously he should be read. Maybe when literary fiction was better, there was a stronger excuse to criticize his work, but now we are impoverished, so there’s more at stake in his fiction, there’s greater intellectual range, than almost everything being published. Anyone who thinks they’re better than David Foster Wallace is probably not.
Joelle Owusu: First things first, you have to stay optimistic, otherwise you will die. You’ll actually burst into flames. I’m optimistic because me, my team, and the people that I kind of choose to associate with in the literary world, we are doing boots on the ground work to find the most amazing writers, get them published, get them paid properly, and get them seen by the world in a mainstream way.
Morgan Entrekin: I think the quality and range of fiction that’s being published is as exciting, more exciting, in my 48 years of doing this, partly because of the explosion of diverse voices, not just in the Anglo-American first world, but all over the world.
Rumaan Alam Credit: David A. Land Rumaan Alam: The opportunities artistically remain the same; they remain infinite. So when people say these ridiculous things like “Contemporary fiction is adrift,” I think you’re not reading enough. Prove to me that you’ve exhausted the potential of contemporary fiction.
Hua Hsu: That there are so many people who so clearly live to continue doing this. It sounds so stupid to say, but I think that it’s easy to forget that the reason many of us started doing this is because we only cared about the craft and the practice. Like it wasn’t necessarily to write a book; it was just to write. And there’s still so many people who do that. I just finished reading this 1300-page history of this obscure hip hop collective called Anticon. The book is called Catch Us Before We Fall Off , and it was such an uplifting thing to read because it was so thorough and so excessive. I’m also reading William Vollman’s Imperial , an equally insane book. I’m attracted to insane endeavors, and literature is a space where these things still happen.
Naomi Kanakia: Big corporate publishing is no longer able to break out authors just by spending a lot of money on them. To me, that’s great! It didn’t feel good to feel like big companies had a stranglehold on who would be considered talented.
Jacques Testard: I think it is a good time to be a small independent. We’ve benefited from an interest in literary books and the corporates shrinking or shying away from so-called mid-list authors, which has freed up space for real quality writing.
Matthew Gasda : The liquidation of institutional opportunities does mean that people can get brave again. And over time, the institutions might form that are not dependent on digital marketing or, like, 2018-style Instagrammable, now TikTokkable books.
No one has created an entirely new ecosystem that’s not emotionally and ideologically dependent on the old ecosystem. The most exciting thing is to embrace the thought experiment that there’s nothing and we’re starting from scratch.
Lauren Oyler: Now there’s no illusion that serious or experimental literature will ever have the place that it did in the 20th century in American culture, so you feel freer to do whatever the fuck you want because you don’t have a hope of making money from it anyway. It’s the freedom that is in a broken system that you cannot escape.
Emma Straub: What we know at the bookstore is that people are reading—people of all ages. Young people in particular are interested in an analog lifestyle.
R.F. Kuang: I’m honestly excited by the younger readers I encounter. That’s what gives me hope —seeing my students get really excited about the stories I assign them.
Bryan Washington: There continue to be writers working in the U.S. in the English language that are doing really interesting things, in fiction, in nonfiction, in poetry. That is always the light at the end of the harbor for me.
Sufiyaan Salam: Any time the world is in a bad place, it’s a good opportunity for art. I was still in primary school when the 2008 financial crash happened, finished into COVID. My experience of the turmoil of global politics over the course of my entire adult life—I think it’s a good time to be writing, especially novels.
Ira Madison III: I’ve got a lot of really cool friends who are writers who are working on really great stuff, and then I also have friends who love reading and recommend shit to me, and read stuff that I recommend to them. Cool people are reading. Cool people that I know are currently writing books, and I’m excited for us all to finish them and get them out there.
LeVar Burton: Books that came out years ago are being discovered all over again thanks to BookTok and the communities born out of it. People who never considered themselves readers are talking about books with the same enthusiasm once reserved for tv shows and films.
And it didn’t happen because a publisher said so. It’s happening organically. Friends sharing a book with friends and saying “I think you’d enjoy this,” just on a much larger platform.
And that’s how stories have always traveled. We’ve simply found a new way to pass them along. ✶
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Source: Celebrities
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